Amazon Kindle to let readers question authors

Don’t you just hate it when you finish reading a book and you’re still stumped about one part of the story, and none of your friends seem to be able to explain it either? Sure you could look it up on Google, or ask a question on Yahoo! Answers – but nobody seems to know the answer, what do you do then? Since not every author has his/her contact details published online, it might be hard to get in touch with them to ask them for a direct answer. Because of that, Amazon has decided to launch a new program which solves this problem.

Amazon recently launched a test version of Kindle that gives users the ability to question authors about their work. Called the @author feature, it lets Kindle users highlight passages in an eBook, add questions about the passage and send them off to the book’s author(s) to get a response from them. If you ask me, that’s a pretty smart idea – why didn’t other eBook companies think of it sooner? So far only 16 authors have taken part in the program, but we should expect more of them to join in the future.

What do you think of the @author feature in Kindle? Is it something that you’d find useful?